The present invention relates to computer communication systems. In particular, the present invention has application in wireless computer systems.
Hand-held wireless systems, such as pagers and palm-top computers, are currently being designed to receive information along dedicated communication channels. Each channel typically is dedicated to a particular type of content that is to be displayed on the mobile device. For example, users can subscribe to a news channel that provides news updates periodically during the day.
The information is typically transmitted to the wireless device by a content provider who packages the information in a data packet addressed to the wireless device. Since the content provider sends messages to multiple devices, each wireless device must examine the addresses of the packets it receives to determine if it is the intended recipient of the data packet. Each time the wireless device makes such a determination, it consumes power. Thus, it is desirable to limit the number of times that the wireless device must make such determinations.
In addition, as with all communication systems, wireless communication systems have a limited bandwidth. Thus, it is desirable to transmit information as compactly as possible.
Unfortunately, current wireless systems that send periodic current-event updates, such as news and sports, tend to produce a large number of short messages. Under the prior art, each of these short messages is sent separately to the wireless devices. This causes each wireless device to process each separate message to determine if it is addressed to the wireless device.
In addition, because the messages are short, they do not lend themselves to being compressed using current compression technologies and thus, negatively impact the wireless communication system""s bandwidth. In fact, the messages are so short that under many compression algorithms the compressed data produced from the message is actually longer than the original message because of overhead associated with the compression algorithm.
A computer readable medium in a computer system has instructions for storing a first and second data packet destined for the same address. The first and second data packets are appended together to produce a merged data packet that is then compressed to produce a compressed data packet. The compressed data packet is then sent to the common address.
The instructions also provide for producing a header that is pre-pended to the merged data packet and that is compressed along with the merged data packet to produce the compressed data packet. In further embodiments, a master header is placed in front of the compressed packet to provide an address for the compressed data packet. A routing tag is also placed in front of the compressed packet to indicate that the compressed data packet needs to be separated into individual messages after it is decompressed.